Subtitles by explosiveskull www.OpenSubtitles.org
Good evening, ladies and gentlemen.
My name is Richard Pryor.
The picture that a lot of people still have
is of this man who is self-destructive,
who is enormously angry.
I'm angry.
- I'm angry... - Are you still?
Yes, I'm very angry.
I'm angry because I'm talented.
There's nobody I've ever met in the business of comedy
who's any more brilliant than me,
and I will never get the recognition for what I do
- in my lifetime... - Why not?
Because of this one bad seed in America.
It works for... it works for economic reasons.
It's called "racism."
Racism keeps a lot of talented human beings
underground.
"Richard Pryor: Live in Concert," great show.
Great show.
Thank you!
He has become the comedian
he was always meant to be.
He reaches his apex.
What you taking my picture for?
Who are you going to show it to?
You're gonna say, "I got a picture of Richard Pryor!"
"Who gives a fuck?"
He was the jewel,
heaven-sent,
and definitely,
definitely here to change lives,
because he changed mine.
I love when white dudes get mad and cuss, right?
Because you all some funny motherfuckers when you cuss.
Right, they'll be saying shit like,
"Yeah, come on, peckerhead."
I feel like Richard kicked the door open,
and figured out a way to talk about
what is going on right now in our world,
and make it funny
but informative.
I just found out some time ago
that sometimes,
women don't have orgasms,
and that fucked me up.
He had more humility, and more humanity,
and more bravery
and more just raw...
The word is "raw" alone.
Pryor... is just pure.
It so moves an audience
to find a performer
who shares their vulnerability with you,
and Richard had that immediacy of contact.
" Live in Concert"
is a remarkable achievement.
Richard Pryor wasn't always this brazen
or as original or as imaginative,
and there was a whole time before "Live in Concert,"
that's the Richard Pryor without a mustache,
that is a very different comic.
For the first time on television,
Richard Pryor.
In the '60s,
most everybody was doing white bread comedy,
meaning comedy that would be presentable for television.
America was a happy place,
and everybody was determined to keep it light.
The American family...
You know, we look at the '60s
like in the rear view,
and it all seems completely normal now,
but, I mean, it was just such a seismic break
with America as anybody knew it.
Like, watching Black people protest
for the right to sit down at lunch counters,
and people are setting firehoses and dogs on them,
and the military's coming in
to escort little Black girls into a schoolhouse,
and, you know, I mean, all that kind of stuff,
Black culture as we know it now,
and as hard as it may be to believe,
was almost invisible.
Just Black people being on TV
was... was startling.
I could not look the way I look
and have been a comedian then.
That would have been, like, "No, you can sing and dance,"
and that's about it.
You've got to be in the box, in this box.
You can't really go outside the box,
because then
you'll be opening up these white people's minds
to what's really going on in the world.
If you look at Richard's first performance
on national TV,
he talks about basically growing up in a tenement
with this interracial group of people,
and it's like he's growing up in a New York apartment building
that's very colorful, lively.
My mother's Puerto Rican and my father's Negro,
and we lived in a real big Jewish tenement building...
...in an Italian neighborhood.
Every time I go outside, the kids say,
"Get him! He's all of them!"
And it's a complete invention,
because he can't talk about how he grew up
in a set of brothels run by his grandmother.
If he were to do that,
it would have been death, you know?
It wouldn't have been comedy
as America construed it at that time.
In the early years,
Richard did a lot of fabrication on a lot of his comedy,
because his own history was so checkered
and so unpleasant.
He wasn't proud of it.
I were...
I was born in Peoria, Illinois.
What's that?
That's a city, nigger.
When Richard is born in 1940,
Peoria is the most unchecked Sin City in America.
You have gambling, you have prostitution,
you have corruption,
you know, all these things totally unchecked.
It's just part of the everyday fabric of life.
Peoria was segregated from top to bottom.
Richard finds that he's actually on the front lines
of part of the desegregation of Peoria.
He starts off at more Black schools.
By the time he gets to fourth, fifth, sixth grade,
suddenly he's like the one Black face.
I was a kid until I was about eight.
Then I became Negro.
The teacher used to tell me,
"You are Negro.
Now say it. 'Ne-gro.'"
"Ne-gro." "Good.
You've learned your lesson well.
You get an A."
He went to school with white kids,
and came home across the tracks
to the place where white men came
to get with Black sex workers,
one of whom included his mom.
You're talking about as far off the entitled,
privileged path of Hollywood
as we can imagine.
These are not mainstream White America's family.
This is the America of the discarded,
the disposable, you know, the denigrated.
I was a child.
There was, like, about 10 houses on this block,
Washington Street,
and that was in the days
when the women used to peck on the window with quarters,
T-t-t...
for customers.
"Hello?"
They'd be talking through the window.
Nobody can hear them out on the streets.
And I grew up seeing my mother go in a room with a man.
Now, I used to peek through keyholes
to watch people make love.
Not "love."
That's the truth.
He was a kid who grew up on the streets of Peoria.
His mother was a whore.
His dad was a pimp.
Come on.
Guys beat the shit out of him.
What did that do?
It eliminated all the bullshit.
Richard had a view of life
that was always based on truth.
You distort the truth,
you made fun of the truth,
you bend the truth,
you twist the truth,
you run over the truth,
but there has to be truth in it.
I think to understand Richard's personality,
you have to start with his grandmother, Marie,
who he called "Mama" his whole life,
because she really did raise him,
and she was his rock,
but she was a very jagged rock.
In some ways, she had to be a brutal person,
because she was the law
in the set of brothels she ran.
In her bra, she would keep a straight razor.
But the brothel was really a family business.
Buck, his father, was the enforcer,
and then you had Gertrude, his mother, a prostitute.
He had to go to court
to choose between the grandmother and the mother.
With whom is he going to live?
And of course, the grandmother is staring at him
while he's on the stand,
you know, "You'd better say me,"
and he'd been coached before,
and he chose his grandmother.
In order to keep himself safe,
he had to break his mother's heart.
I mean, that's quite a choice to make.
He had a deep relationship
for his grandmother, you know?
She was like his master.
She had total control over his brain,
over his emotions, over his mind, how he felt,
you know...
she was a savior to him,
to some degree.
The family,
as complicated and as painful as it all was,
was also
the repository of all this wonderful humor
and characters
that Richard took from.
So poor Richard turned out to be...
kind of a genius to do all that, you know,
turn your pain into comedy.
Richard is coming up
in the 1960s as a Black comic
at a time when there was really no public understanding
of Black comedy in the mainstream.
...Let me see, where was I at? Oh yeah.
The real comedy was taking place
on what was known as the Chitlin Circuit,
this segregated circuit of Black comedy clubs,
performance venues across the nation.
He's not performing for a white audience.
He's performing for other Black people.
Pryor doesn't spend that long
on the Chitlin circuit.
He sees Bill Cosby has made it.
He's a Black comedian
who's somehow making it in mainstream America,
and he says,
you know, "I figure, I gotta be that guy."
And the next thing you know,
he's hightailing it to New York.
I met Richie for the first time
when we were working together at the Improvisational.
Richie and I, being the most unknown,
were given the worst slot,
which started usually 1:30 or 2:00 in the morning,
and it turned out to be
a great training ground for Richie,
because we had to perform for several drunken people,
and a few hookers and a couple of cab drivers,
and it was, like, hard to get laughs, you know?
And I'd come from this background
which was more political,
and Richie had come straight
from his very painful background,
which I knew nothing about at that time,
and I said, "Well, I want to try to understand it.
Talk to me about it,"
and he was very, very unwilling
to go there with me.
Richard,
his whole thing was at that time Bill Cosby,
because Bill Cosby
was the most successful Black comedian in America,
even though not considered Black.
He was not a 'hood guy,
so Richard, even though being from the 'hood,
un-'hooded himself.
Let's say hello to Bill Cosby!
I'd, uh, I'd just like to take time out here
and talk about athletes in television commercials.
I watch a lot of advertising on television.
Commercials are really funny.
"Aftershave, it's wonderful.
It's cool.
And it's smooth."
That's a lie.
"Miss Jones, what do you think of our Washday detergent?"
"I like it, I love it, I use it all the time.
I brush my teeth with it, I wash my hair with it.
Send a check."
Performing in front of Whitey,
in that time, in that society,
we want a clean Black man.
We want a Black man to show "Everything's perfect.
I have a family.
Look, I'm better than the rest of the Black people."
Do you know what it feels like
for a Black comic to walk out on the stage
and not see his people in the audience?
The check is good,
but goddamn.
That fucking ride from that venue home is tough.
You know...
I'm pretty sure that's how he felt
as a Black man.
By the mid-'60s,
he's really starting to make it
on mainstream American talk shows
like Merv Griffin, variety shows.
I seen Frank Sinatra.
You've seen him?
Close up as anything.
He was thrilled about seeing me too.
Yeah?
What did he say to you?
You know, nothing. What is he gonna say?
I was looking like an idiot.
He is succeeding in the strategy
of being a kind of a Cosby clone.
He's doing these shows
for things like Kraft Summer Music Hall
that are very white bread.
He's very contained.
He's very constrained.
Ladies and gentlemen, you've met our two comedians,
George Carlin and Richard Pryor.
First of all, there's the neat, precise laugher.
You've seen him? It's like...
Kind of strange.
Richard, what's your favorite kind of laughter?
Well, I got a laugh.
I don't know if it's my favorite,
but it's one I hear above everyone else.
It's sort of a witch's laugh.
It kind of scares you, you know?
He started out as a one-liner type comedian.
That's super easy,
but, like, what's the point of getting on stage
and talking to a bunch of people,
and enjoying it,
but not giving them anything to go home and think about?
Nothing to chew on, you know what I'm saying?
Like, give 'em some food for thought.
Onstage, Richard existed in a place
that was transcendent,
and it was like gills on a fish.
He was able to breathe and...
As soon as he's off-stage,
he really didn't know how to operate in the world.
Drugs allowed him to be
something other than himself with a memory,
a memory of that childhood.
I mean, Richard should have been in therapy,
but he wasn't.
He found drugs.
I called him up excited
because he had never done acid,
and it's important it was on the seventh floor.
I'm sitting there having my acid trip,
and he's sitting over here having his,
and I look over,
and I see he's trying to jump out of the window,
and I had been having this wonderful experience,
but I'm now realizing that I can't let go of his foot,
and he said he saw something horrible,
he doesn't want to tell me what it is,
but he felt he had to kill it,
and that, I must admit, is when I recognized
that our backgrounds were so profoundly different,
and had left such serious scars on him
that it affected the capacity to continue the friendship
in the same kind of way.
He starts really leading a double life.
You know, on the one hand, he's continuing to work
for places like the Kraft Summer Music Hall,
Ed Sullivan,
for mainstream white America.
On the other hand,
he's also feeling the storms of change,
of the civil rights movement and Black power.
He's performing at Black clubs,
places like the Troubadour,
or playing Redd Foxx's club,
and he feels the need to be more militant.
One thing that's been really underacknowledged
in terms of the dramatic shift...
...in Black culture
that happened in the late '60s
really is the assassination of Martin Luther King.
His death was looked at as something
that you could collectively hang on all of white America,
and that pushed a lot of folks who'd been on the fence
into just becoming bolder,
more audacious, more ambitious,
more kind of demanding of America.
Richard felt like
American TV wanted to censor people
and wanted people
not to represent the world as it was,
and, in fact,
one of his greatest sketches from the time
is about, you know, what does it mean
to be both somebody who's doing menial work for white people,
and on the other hand, have these kind of superpowers
that you know you really want to tap into.
It's a bird!
It's a plane!
No, it's the liner man!
A hero, a Black hero.
I always wanted to go to movies and see a Black hero.
I figured out maybe someday on television,
they'll have it, man.
Like, you'll see on television,
and he'll come out, "Whoosh!
"Look! Up in the sky!
It's a crow!"
"It's a bat!"
"No! It's Supernigger!"
He tells a reporter from Ebony, he says,
"Be clean, they always tell you to be clean.
They want you to be something that doesn't exist at all,"
and these are two halves of his life
that are very hard to reconcile,
and this creates a war in his psyche,
and this kind of double life,
but this double life is not really sustainable,
and it implodes in spectacular ways
when he's asked to be one of the headliners
at a gig at the Aladdin Hotel in Las Vegas.
Richard told me about it.
It's a nice gig, you're in Vegas, it's fabulous.
You got the big suite,
you got the $100-a-day meal money,
but there was no Black people in the crowd,
and he said,
"I just couldn't get in front of those white faces anymore."
They say Richard Pryor walked off the stage.
"Why the fuck I gotta entertain them?"
You know?
"This ain't the people at the brothel.
This ain't the motherfuckers in the street.
This ain't the people at the liquor store," you know?
Like, "I'm cheating them
and myself,
because I've let somebody influence me
that really ain't no better than me.
Bill Cosby's clean.
Families love him.
And this is the way that I'm supposed to go?
I can't go that way.
That's not authentic."
And I think that's how Richard Pryor felt.
I think he felt guilty
because of where he came from.
He was like, "Fuck it.
This is not who I am.
I'm not speaking my truth,"
and just kind of at that time,
possibly throwing a lucrative career away.
I don't think people understand.
When you do the Sullivan show,
that's just such a prestigious thing,
and he was out of the Ed Sullivan running
because of Vegas.
That's a really bad situation to be in.
He had no money,
no nothing, zero.
He decided to walk away from the game,
and he drove up to the Bay area
and basically went on hiatus.
Richard travels up to Berkeley,
and because of campus unrest
and unrest in the city,
Ronald Reagan as governor of California
declared martial law.
For weeks in Berkeley,
it was occupied by the National Guard,
so people who were there in Berkeley
felt like the state was trying to crush them.
Richard has the amazingly good fortune
to meet up with a group of Black intellectuals,
and this is what takes him
into some very experimental places.
Cecil Brown used to have this,
what do you call it? A salon.
You would meet all kinds of characters.
Angela Davis and Huey Newton were all hanging out.
We were like a cultural, intellectual wing.
We were inspired by the Nation of Islam,
and Martin Luther King,
and Malcolm X.
On the west coast, things were happening,
we had the Black Panthers,
so that's the atmosphere that Pryor came into
when he left Las Vegas.
You have a guy like Richard Pryor
in the Bay area.
I mean, he hung out with Huey P. Newton,
the leader of the Black Panther party.
He was on the scene.
I saw Richard Pryor.
He was very tame.
He did a performance that was not really memorable.
It didn't have any bite.
We didn't go for that Las Vegas stuff.
He couldn't get away with that stuff in Berkeley.
They said, "You're just doing, like, an act.
You're not doing you.
You gotta do what is you."
And they got him into his grandmother.
They got him into the wino guy and everything like that,
and he talked it out on tapes.
That's when things changed.
It's, uh, really hard to be funny
when, you know, what went down at Attica.
You know, it really upsets me.
I wrote something about it I'd like to read to you.
"Murder the dogs,
the mad, frothing-at-the-mouth dogs,
with expensive capped teeth
and fat bellies full of babies starving.
No, don't wait until they die, kill them now,
because if you let them live and die a natural death,
you'll be bitten and left to die in agony,
and the mad dog pack
will then sniff out and search for your children to eat,
eat whole, flesh, bones, and soul."
He was searching for a direction.
He was searching for a stance, politically and culturally,
and he went back and forth.
Richard was conscious of being
both used or exploited politically.
He didn't want to be that in some ways,
and in the other, he felt drawn to avail himself
of having the right image with Black people,
who had tremendous disenfranchisement.
I saw in a very good sense
that despite his contacts
with these militant Black people,
he was smart in being self-protective
and not getting himself past a certain point of danger,
and I asked him once,
which is a conversation I never forgot,
why he was skittish about this,
and he said
because he remembered from his grandmother
the fear of jail,
and the fear of jail was never away from him,
and I just recognized something that I had no access to
in how astonishing that statement was,
that the fear of jail
was something he carried with him all his life,
no matter how successful he became.
Now, let's pretend like the lights are out,
and there ain't no cameras, and none of that shit.
You dig?
Then I can get down.
Coming out of Berkeley,
he performs at the Improv in New York.
He met audiences
who hadn't followed him on his transformation.
They were expecting
the Richard Pryor of Ed Sullivan, you know,
and instead, they got the Richard Pryor of Berkeley.
I remember tricks used to come through our neighborhood.
That's where I first met white people.
They'd come down through our neighborhood
to help the economy.
Nice white dudes, though.
Because I could have been a bigot.
You know what I mean?
I could have been prejudiced.
I could have been, man, but I met nice white men.
Just come in and, "Hello, little boy.
Is your mother home? I'd like a blow job."
Hmm...
There's definitely a certain amount of courage
you have to have.
"Yeah, my daddy's a pimp, my mama's a whore.
My grandmama runs a whorehouse."
America didn't want to hear about that kind of stuff.
That wasn't politically correct.
This ain't as funny
as we thought it was going to be.
He jumped into
the deep end of his psyche.
Somebody had to be the first one to do it,
and he was one of the first people.
Once you tell the truth, there's no going back,
and at the same time, it takes its toll,
because you're sharing those memories with people,
and can you really trust people with that information?
They're laughing,
but also suddenly you're a raw nerve.
All of us have something to say,
but some are never heard.
Over seven years ago,
the people of Watts stood together
and demanded to be heard.
On a Sunday
this past August in the Los Angeles Coliseum,
over 100,000 Black people came together
to commemorate that moment in American history.
The Wattstax documentary
was intended as a recognition
of the Watts riots from 1965.
There was an all-day concert
from the Stax label,
The Staple Singers,
Rufus Thomas,
the Bar-Kays,
headlined by Isaac Hayes.
Richard Pryor fits perfect in the documentary
as a sort of additional layer of commentary.
He's talking about it in a way that is especially Black.
I mean, they accidentally shoot more niggers out here
than any place in the world.
Every time I pick up a paper,
"Nigger accidentally shot in the ass."
How do you accidentally shoot a nigger
six times in the chest?
"Well, my gun fell and just went crazy."
With Wattstax, suddenly
he's like the narrator of the Black condition,
and he's going to take that moving forward,
and that makes him
a perfect person to desegregate Hollywood
in the years to come.
One of the most brilliant comedy minds in existence,
and a man who many consider the funniest man alive,
Mr. Richard Pryor.
When I first started representing Richard,
I was told by many people
that "this is a troubled artist,
and you should stay away from him,"
but everybody knew he was a great comic,
and knew that he was a very, very funny person,
and knew that he was destined, if only he could behave,
for stardom.
Richard had this reputation for being difficult,
for being aggressive.
There are all sorts of stories, which I love,
of Richard putting hands on various people in Hollywood.
He brought a different kind of energy
to the Hollywood film set.
The Mack is my favorite
of that whole period of movies.
You know, there's all these insane things
that happened in the making of the movie
that were in some ways more interesting
than the movie itself.
Pryor got upset with the producer of the movie,
and decided that he was just going to go take this cat out.
He talks about, like,
putting a pool ball or something in a sock,
and he goes to this guy's room,
and he opens the door,
and the guy's got a loaded .45 sitting on his desk
like he was expecting him.
I mean, it was just insane.
The thing about Richard Pryor
is like a lot of performers from his era,
he was never just one thing.
You see Richard in movies like Lady Sings the Blues
playing Piano Man.
It's very clear
that Richard Pryor is an amazing talent.
Now, Richard,
it seems that you're really kind of stretching out
in terms of expressing yourself.
Yes.
That is true.
I am stretching out.
I am in a movie currently at the theatres
in your neighborhood...
" Lady Sings the Blues ."
Richard was not a trained actor.
You know, he didn't go to Juilliard.
You know, I think he worked off of...
impulse and reality,
so when he showed up on movie sets,
his characters were incredibly authentic
because they were probably pieces of his life.
We were working at his house
when Berry Gordy called him
to tell him he'd seen a screening
of Lady Sings the Blues,
and there was Oscar talk for Richard,
and I could see how pleased he was,
how excited he was that...
that he was liked,
or appreciated in some way.
From Television City in Hollywood, Lily Tomlin!
I had an offer to do a special at CBS,
and I wanted Richard more than anybody
to be on the show.
When I first met Richard,
he took me to a porno movie with him,
and I said, "Okay, I'll pay my own way,"
and, uh... we did that.
He was testing me.
Jane Wagner, my partner,
who was one of the producers of the show,
she had written a piece for Pryor specifically,
so we knew we had a big centerpiece for him to do.
Lily Tomlin, with her partner, Jane Wagner,
creates this incredible playlet,
you know, 10 minutes long,
that has more emotional subtlety
and more range
than so many long works of arthouse cinema.
...and I think if you're going to eat the lobster whole...
Jane wrote "Juke and Opal,"
the piece about the woman with the diner
who is friends with this junkie, Juke,
who's in a methadone program.
Give me a bowl of soup.
I oughta give you a bowl of methadone,
that's what I oughta do.
Mmm...
That's what I'm strung out on now, that methadone.
He comes in, and he's cold.
He just so embodies it. He's so good,
and then he starts eating the potato soup,
and he says, "I ain't caught a potato yet."
That's homemade potato soup.
It needs salt.
No, it needs some potatoes.
Where is the potatoes?
Thank you very much.
Then the two kids come in
who are, like, canvassing the neighborhood,
and they start intruding themselves
in a kind of condescending way.
You want me to be out there on the street?
You really shouldn't give him the money.
You know what he's gonna do with it.
He's gonna go out of here and just...
I know what he's going to do with it.
He's going to go out of here
and get me 10 pounds of potatoes.
I like them little red new potatoes
for my potato soup.
Hey, man, that's wrong.
You know, you're wrong, man.
I mean, I ain't a bad cat or nothing, man,
because you hurt me.
I wasn't interfering in your life.
He's taking people
who are in the throes of addiction,
but cannot be reduced to that.
They are not one-dimensional.
They have all this emotional capacity
and sensitivity.
It packs such an incredible portrait
of interracial intimacy, affection, ambivalence,
into that 10 minutes of TV drama.
All right.
Here... here's your 10 back.
I ain't gonna buy no more potatoes.
Well, while we were filming this special,
I'd always heard
the executives were watching everything upstairs,
and sure enough, the whole stage...
shooting stopped, and everybody had disappeared.
The executives came down and told us,
you know, they didn't want to see this on the show,
because it was about race and all that stuff,
but by that time,
I had learned to film one thing
to trade for another,
and I traded it for Juke and Opal.
It was good.
I mean, the suits were upset.
Thank you all so much for tuning in
to this wholesome and uplifting show.
I want to thank my guests, Richard Pryor...
Papa. Papa...
Bill Gerber...
Judy Kahan...
As an African-American,
sometimes in this society, in this country,
you have to play both sides of the fence.
At the time when Richard Pryor was doing what he was doing,
he was like a sore thumb, you know.
He looked very, very strange and odd
doing what he was doing,
because he was breaking new barriers.
At this point,
he had failed as a Hollywood actor,
not critically,
because he had done wonderful performances,
but he wasn't getting calls,
and so it was because he had to earn a living
that he was like,
"I guess I've got to go back to that stand-up stage."
You know, like, when the Martians landed and shit,
white folks got scared.
They're all, "Golly, I'll tell ya,
just a big old helicopter thing came down and landed,
the people got out, had that fu all over their bodies...
Jesus Christ!"
Nothing can scare a nigger...
after 400 years of this shit.
I mean, right? A Martian ain't got a chance.
A nigger would warn the Martian
"You better get your ass away from around here."
"You done landed on Mr. Gilmore's property."
He made this comedy album
that had the impact of, like, a great hit record.
It felt as big as Thriller at the time.
Like, if you were Black, this was in your household.
That album right there?
Shit. That was the album.
That was my favorite album.
That was Richard Pryor,
and that album right there
gave a lot of brothers in the inner city a voice.
Allwell would fight the police.
He's one of them crazy "shoot me" niggers.
"Well, kill me!"
"Shoot me, motherfucker!
Hi-ya! Oh, shit..."
"Oh, goddamn."
I remember he was doing jokes about white police officers,
and them killing us and stuff a long time ago.
A long time ago.
If you watch YouTube,
they'll incorporate stuff that Richard Pryor said onstage
in, like, you know, "Stop the Violence" videos,
because this stuff didn't just start yesterday.
It's been going on for years.
There ain't no way
to get an ambulance in the ghetto, right?
Unless you call up.
"There's five niggers killing the white woman!"
You think America wanted to know
what a bunch of niggers was doing in a room
with some fish sandwiches,
and niggers shooting craps,
and prostitutes and pimps,
and motherfuckers selling radios, and...
that was a hidden world that people didn't know about,
and Richard Pryor put it on wax
and made it beautiful.
The impact was huge.
A big turning point
in Richard's career
and for him as an artist
was winning the Grammy for That Nigger's Crazy.
He was accepted,
and better still,
he was accepted in the crossover audience as well.
I don't know how you feel about the title of your album,
but I find it difficult to say.
- You do? - Yes, I do.
Most white people, it's hard to say "crazy."
No. The title...
You tell them the title of your album.
I can't say this.
The title of the album is "That Nigger's Crazy."
I mean, don't that nigger look crazy?
That is one crazy nigger.
But don't you get...
See, now, you can just say that and...
if I said it, wouldn't you get mad?
I'd punch you out.
Of course!
Pryor and the word "nigger."
Pryor and the most dangerous,
endearing, and hurtful word
in the English language all at once,
depending on who's using it, and to whom,
and with what intention.
See, niggers can say "nigger" with different feelings,
like "Hey, nigger! What's happening?"
"Nigger!" "Hey, my nigger!"
But white people say, "Hey, nigger."
"Come here, nigger, I'm gonna tell you something."
"See that tree?
Go hang yourself on it."
Richard understood
the inherent controversy of the word,
but he also knew
that that word had a different meaning
when used amongst African-Americans,
and so he brings this all out into the public
on an album that is his first major album,
and I think the beginning
of a very new phase in his career,
as he's soon to become
the most dominant cultural and comedic voice
in the country.
I'd like to do something for you.
I can't do anything off of my album on television,
but I can do something close to it.
Is that all right?
Yeah!
Black church is a lot different
than when you go to white church,
because usually in white church,
they have strange music.
I mean, you go in there, right, you hear,
♪ Ooh, ooh, ooh... ♪
And you don't know if Dracula is gonna jump out on you
or not, you know?
Right, and Black preachers know God personally, right?
When you go to church, they go, "You know.."
I first met God
in 1929!"
♪ Walking... down the street... ♪
Pryor's transition
from being a Chitlin Circuit comedian,
to being a minor film celebrity in blaxploitation,
to then having his own breakthrough
with " That Nigger's Crazy,"
into these opportunities
to be placed inside of mainstream films,
I mean, all of this occurs,
you know, within a period of three or four years.
It happens at a dizzying kind of pace.
As I moved up in the studio ranks,
the question was,
"What can we do that nobody else is doing?"
And what appealed to me enormously was comedy.
There was a saxophone player
who was headlining a bad jazz club in Van Nuys.
Richard did 20 minutes, opening act.
Stunning.
I went backstage to talk to him.
He was doing heroin at the time, so that wasn't a good sign.
I told him I wanted him to come to Universal,
and he thought that was a good idea,
and this was all backstage at this place,
and that turned into many pictures
over many years.
Praise the Lord! Praise the Lord!
Amen!
He agreed to do a one-day part for me
in Car Wash,
where he plays this bootleg preacher
based on a real guy named Reverend Ike.
Richard did the scene with the Pointer Sisters,
and it was, it was hilarious.
There's a good place in this world for money.
Yes, siree, and I know where it is.
It's right here in my pocket.
Gimme some!
He basically comes in the movie and steals the scene,
and some might argue steals the movie,
but at that time,
old, white Hollywood was not ready
for young, Black Richard Pryor
in all his blackness.
When I delivered Car Wash to the studio,
the distribution people said,
"How are we going to sell this?
It's a Black movie."
Thom Mount on the inside of the studio thinking,
and the distribution thinking,
he's dealing with all of these guys
who are, like, real racists.
I showed it
to the then-head of distribution at Universal.
He got up, and he started walking out,
and I followed him.
I said, "What's the matter? Are you all right?"
He said, "I'm not going to watch any of this.
We're not going to distribute a nigger picture."
"Okay."
I was very young,
and my view of the world was very different
than the 60-year-old guys who were running Universal,
none of whom understood what the hell I was doing.
I realized, no matter what happened,
Car Wash was going to be some kind of a hit.
One of Richard's great breakthroughs in this time
as a Hollywood actor
is an experience
that he actually didn't value that much at the time,
which is his role starring with Gene Wilder
in Silver Streak.
He starts off with a very small part,
but again, they find that he's so good at improvisation
that suddenly there's a new life
injected into the film.
In the context of these films,
he didn't have a problem tucking it all in,
and not being the dynamic Richard Pryor
we knew from stand-up,
but being this other guy,
to be the Black buddy inside of a buddy movie.
He and Hollywood, for most of his film career,
are doing this dance
where they're trying each other out.
They're giving him just enough room,
and he's giving them just enough of his attitude
and his edge
to still maintain a certain amount of integrity.
I had watched Richard's work
in other films
where he was always playing the second banana,
and the producer came to me and said,
you know, "What do you want to do next?"
And I said, "Well, there's so much Black talent out here
that doesn't have a vehicle to display that talent,
so I'd like to develop something for Richard Pryor."
He went and searched for a project,
which became Which Way Is Up?
Goddamn!
Which Way Is Up?
may be the greatest vehicle for him as a comic actor,
and that's because
it's taking these elements of his stage comedy,
the fact that he can throw himself
into so many different fascinating characters,
and saying, "Let's do that onscreen."
The characters that we were creating to oppose Richard,
we decided that he would play all three of those parts.
He was so brilliant and so funny.
She's got a knife!
God damn, the bitch done gone berserk!
Ow!
Let go of that door, nigger!
With Michael Schultz,
he found his best directorial translator,
somebody who was able to kind of create a world
that Pryor could really just be comfortable in.
I mean, I think about
those films that they did together
as a specific body of work in Pryor's canon.
Come on, nigger!
Damn! They trying to knock him over the wall!
Get out of my way, nigger!
He decides to take this movie
called Greased Lightning,
playing a race car driver, Wendell Scott,
and we were in a town called Madison, Georgia,
but it had all of the mentality
of the real deep South,
and one of the things about Richard
is that he always had a commitment
to have as many Black supporting actors
and crew people as possible,
so here was an almost all-Black crew
that Richard had put together,
and the townspeople were apoplectic.
They were trying to create all kinds of havoc
to make the film people go away,
and the sheriff finally called a town meeting,
and he said, "Look, y'all.
These niggers will be gone
in three weeks.
Do not mess with the money."
And calmed them down, you know,
to a degree.
All right, nigger.
During the filming of Greased Lightning,
Richard records an album
which may stand
as his most fearless achievement as a comedian,
and it shows how far he was taking American comedy.
" Bicentennial Nigger ."
I mean, that's the funniest thing in the world,
because the Bicentennial,
1776 to 1976,
was such a moment of patriotism in American society,
but a lot of people were asking
how far have African-Americans come
during this time?
Today, another president has made the journey
to Philadelphia,
this time to mark the 200th year of liberty in America.
Ladies and gentlemen,
the President of the United States.
The celebration of the United States
was a white celebration,
because Black people had been marginal
throughout most, if not all, of that time,
so Richard is acknowledging the time,
"Bicentennial,"
but he's putting a particular twist on it.
The title track
is this stick of dynamite with a slow fuse.
What that track does is it says, you know,
where did Black humor come from?
It came from
not people trying to entertain people,
but it comes from the slave ships.
It comes from the person who's on the slave ship rowing,
and is crying and thinking,
"Yesterday, I was a king,"
and that gap between what you have in your heart,
what you have in your soul,
your sense of worth as a person,
and how erased you've been by America,
that gap creates a space for humor.
And so he starts thinking about,
"Well, what has America wanted from us as Black people?
It's wanted us to present ourselves
as these minstrel figures
who consent to our own servitude,
who consent to our own slavery,"
and the way it ends is with this person
who's acting like a kind of minstrel.
Then they split us all up.
Yassir, they took my mama over that way,
took my wife that way,
took my kids, oh yeah.
Yuk, yuk, yuk!
I'm just so happy.
Yuk, yuk, yuk.
I don't know what to do.
I don't know what to do
if I don't get 200 more years of this.
Yuk, yuk, yuk!
Lord have mercy.
That's something.
I don't know where my old mama is now.
She up beyond there
in that big white folks' in the sky.
Yuk, yuk, yuk.
Y'all probably done forgot about it.
Yuk, yuk, yuk!
But I ain't gonna never forget it.
He says, "I ain't never gonna forget
what America has done to me,"
and he's kind of ripping off the mask,
and saying, "You think Black people
have consented to anything that America has done to us?
The way you've ripped apart our families?"
And he's saying,
"I'm going to hold you guys to account."
Heave!
Captain! Captain!
Hold it, hold it!
What is it? What is it?
Captain, the men,
they're dropping like flies up there!
All right.
It's time for another one.
Another one, huh?
You!
No!
Where are you taking me?
You're going to NBC!
You're going to do your own special!
Oh, no! No!
I started hanging out at the Comedy Store.
That's how I got to meet Letterman and Robin.
One night, I followed Richard out into the parking lot,
and he turned to me and he said, "What the fuck do you want?"
I said, "Will you do a...
a television special?"
He said, "Sell it."
He got in the car and drove away.
That was it.
Network television in the late 1970s
was very conservative.
Richard Pryor was not conservative
by any stretch of the imagination,
but even with those challenges,
there are still some great skits.
Richard Pryor playing
the nation's first Black president
speaks to the fact that in 1977,
the idea of a Black president was still a joke.
- Mr. President, Mr. President. - Yes?
Mr. President, now, your predecessor,
you know, President Carter?
Now, his mother was a nurse before...
What is your question about, sir?
My question? I'm leading up to my question.
The question is about your mother...
Whoa! Hey!
When NBC offered Pryor this variety show,
he wanted young, interesting talent,
and Paul Mooney was really responsible
for putting together that ensemble.
From the first day that America recognized him
as a stand-up comic,
the critics knew we had something unique.
Who else would have the nerve
to do Bill Cosby's entire routine?
Paul Mooney,
he's kind of like an alter-ego.
He's like an id for Pryor,
you know, and I think for his part,
you know, Pryor was a kind of mouthpiece for Mooney.
Paul was a great conceptual guy.
Wonderful in concept, and a great eye for talent.
Look at the cast.
Sandra Bernhard,
Robin Williams,
Jimmy Martinez,
Tim Reid,
all wonderful actors all in their own right.
Mr. Mojo, I got a bad arm!
I can't move it!
He got a bad arm!
And he can't move it!
Let Mojo heal it!
My baptism into showbiz was The Richard Pryor Show.
I thought that's how all shows were done.
No.
No, that's not how it's done.
You got to do what you want to do
and got away with what you want to do,
because that guy had your back.
It was a great crash course
in being around genius,
but also being around somebody who was...
Yeah!
...so sensitive
and so in tune with what made them happy
and what made them unhappy
that the whole project imploded within two months.
Any time there was a censor,
or any sort of, like, editing,
he was just freaking out.
I am an NBC spokesman,
and I will be happy to tell you what Mr. Pryor is saying.
"Gosh, I'm just pleased as punch
to be continuing on as part of the NBC family.
They truly understand me."
Listen, he wasn't stupid.
He knew when he went on primetime television,
his movie pay doubled,
his exposure doubled,
his whole thing to America who didn't know him.
Everybody knew who Richard Pryor was.
When he said "sell it" in the parking lot,
he was way ahead of me.
He's just thankful somebody asked him.
"If this little fucker can get me on TV,
I'm going to do it."
A lot of people said it was canceled,
and the show wasn't canceled.
You know, we only did four shows,
and that was our intent,
because it's really...
it's hard work trying to do something
and people telling you you can't.
Do you really think
that some of the guys that you've dealt with at NBC,
that some of these guys
really want to promote racism?
Actively? Or is it subconscious?
I just think it's part of capitalism,
is to promote racism...
you know, right?
It seems that the only time you get in a position of power
is if you're like the people that are in power,
to me.
I mean, that's the way it goes.
I mean, people that get to become executives
become like the people that were already executives.
In the '70s, he's arguably
the most important cultural figure of the decade.
His albums, his appearances in film,
his persona,
all of these things are, uh, outstanding.
The summer of '77,
I pull into Lucy's driveway,
dusty with a cowboy hat on,
and I said, "Well, I'm back in town.
I need a gig. I'm broke.
I need some work."
She said, "Well, you can be my assistant.
I'm decorating Richard's house."
The first day I met him was August 22, 1977.
Gee, I remember that date.
Every morning, I'd go to work,
I'd sit at the dining room table,
and he'd come out with a new...
a new woman every morning,
and I would sit with him, and we'd have these long talks.
When he wasn't high on drugs
and full of that macho bravado,
he was a really kind man.
And I wasn't aware of his work.
I was aware that he was this mad genius
she'd described him as...
but when I met him,
all I saw was this really vulnerable man
with whom I immediately connected.
By 1977, in some ways,
Richard Pryor's career couldn't be any better,
you know, he's starring in major Hollywood films,
he has his own TV show.
On the other hand, he's completely falling apart
under the weight of his obligations,
and you see him both exhibit his fearlessness
as an artist and performer,
and also implode utterly
at the Hollywood Bowl.
The deal at the Hollywood Bowl, I said,
"Look, I'm going to ask Richard if you want him to be here,
but," I said, "You're going to get Richard."
He just has to shake things up.
He just had to.
And he came out on stage,
and it was a largely gay audience.
I came here for human rights.
He was told this was a benefit for human rights,
and that was the organizers of the concert
being euphemistic.
If this is about gay rights,
he wants to basically say,
you know, we should talk about gay sex.
We should talk about
the right for people to do whatever they want
with whatever parts of their anatomy.
And he gets very explicit.
I have sucked a dick.
Almost from the get-go,
he said, "I've sucked a dick."
You know?
And, man, they're cheering "Yay, yay," and all that stuff,
and then it just went...
Then he just threw it in their face.
It's the first time in my life
I ever realized that faggots are prejudiced,
because I don't see no niggers out here.
And he ends up with, "Kiss my rich Black ass."
You know, and he exits...
Anyway.
And everybody went a little nuts.
And when the niggers was burning down Watts,
you motherfuckers was doing what you wanted to do
on Hollywood Boulevard,
didn't give a shit about it.
Then kiss my happy rich Black ass.
Richard's polymorphous experience as a child
spilled over particularly when he was high,
when his guard was down,
and I think that was a very difficult night.
I'm not surprised by any of it,
nor am I horrified by any of it.
Richard was never politically correct.
I don't think everybody knows everything
about somebody's inner workings
and how they're feeling.
I mean, that man was abused as a child.
He was going through all kind of craziness as a child.
But then also, you've got to remember,
he told everybody he did drugs,
and sometimes you do drugs,
and drugs, they make you not give a fuck about nothing,
and you just be like, "This what Imma do!"
You have no control of that.
You know, there was shame surrounding his childhood,
but he was also very open about his sexuality.
I mean, it was the '70s.
You'd fuck a radiator
and send it flowers in the morning.
Right?
It was... I mean, we were all doing...
Threesomes? Yeah.
I mean, I was doing threesomes with Warren Beatty,
and, you know, Richard was like,
"Can we have a threesome, please?"
I said, "Richard, you're not supposed to do it
when you're in love.
This is just recreational only."
No! He demanded it.
"No, we have to have threesomes.
Come on, you did 'em with Warren,
and, you know, all these other people.
You have to do it with me."
Mistake.
So the three of us are in bed, and we're doing our thing...
...I don't know what the fuck happened.
I guess it got too good,
and he went crazy, batshit crazy,
going through the house, smashing up the house,
took a chair to a brand-new Tiffany lamp.
I mean, he went... he went nuts.
He got so jealous of this woman in bed with us.
So I said, "See, Richard? I told you,
you're not supposed to do it when you're in love."
That was just, you know, '70s shit.
Richard never had a girlfriend
and never had a wife.
He really didn't.
I mean, I hate to say it,
but he never had that,
because they were very disposable for him.
Because it was too much pressure,
too many chicks.
Wilt Chamberlain says he had 25,000 women.
Richard's in that category.
It just went because he was Richard Pryor.
Richard had a seriously complicated relationship
with women.
I think he loved women.
He was a womanizer, certainly.
But I think he was terrified of abandonment,
and I believe that came from where he came from,
that duality with the grandmother,
the abandonment from his own mother...
He had a really hard time believing
that he could be loved.
I can't tell whether you really like women,
or you really hate women,
or that whether women really hurt you at some time,
which perhaps gives you a rather ambivalent feeling
towards them.
I think, uh... women...
if they don't hurt you, they don't love you.
I mean, love hurts. It's very painful.
Richard begins 1978,
New Year's Eve,
by shooting up the car of his recent wife,
Deborah McGuire,
and this is a criminal incident,
and so he is mandated by the judge in that case
to submit to psychological counseling.
The charges stem from an incident yesterday
when Pryor reportedly argued with his wife
and two houseguests.
He allegedly rammed his Mercedes
into the guests' car when they tried to leave,
then fired 10 shots into the car.
The road that Richard traveled
was a fast and furious road.
I mean, one week in Richard's life
is like 25 years to somebody living in Indiana.
I mean, he just was...
such a clip, you know, such a fast pace.
We started dating in 1978.
He didn't want a fuckin' nurse.
He wanted a ride-or-die bitch, you know.
He did.
And he wanted company on this journey,
somebody who could hang.
I could hang.
It's exciting, you know,
being in show business.
It's exciting, you know.
I like going home,
because I can show off when I go home,
but some brothers break my face.
"Nigger, you ain't shit.
You wasn't shit when you was here."
"I seen you do that shit.
That's the same shit you was doing
around the pool room, nigger.
It ain't nothing.
Let me have a dollar."
Richard wanted to go back to Peoria
to touch base at home.
The first time I met the grandmother,
she didn't shake my hand.
It was a fist,
and I was taken aback.
She said, "I got salt in it.
It's helping my arthritis."
"Okay."
Some old friends showed up.
Of course, there was cocaine and alcohol,
and lots of food.
It gets later and later, and everyone's more high,
and all of a sudden, Richard goes into a meltdown.
He stands up.
He's, "You never loved me!
You never loved me!
You've used me always!
You used me against my mother!
You used me!"
He's crying hysterically.
The grandmother looks like
she's about to have a heart attack.
I wake up in the morning, and Richard's not next to me.
"Where's Richard?"
"He's busy."
"He's busy?"
I walk up the stairs,
and there are bedrooms on the top level,
and I open the door,
and Richard's with another woman.
They had set him up with... a woman.
I guess that was the panacea for the pain
and the explosion he had.
They were going to fix him with a dalliance
right in the house,
under my nose.
A whorehouse.
Richard, he's going to therapy.
He's reliving his life.
He's also going to the Comedy Store
and woodshedding a new act
in which he's reflecting on what made him Richard Pryor,
on growing up with his grandmother,
the kind of discipline that he got from her,
and the relationship he had with his father,
and out of this
comes his arguably crowning achievement,
Richard Pryor: Live in Concert
As luck would have it,
when I showed up at the Comedy Store,
Richard Pryor was working on
one of his seminal concert movies,
and I had never seen somebody
really work on material.
My philosophy is
that most people don't have a sense of humor.
Most people don't.
The ability to laugh at a joke is not a sense of humor.
A sense of humor is to sense humor,
to feel that there's humor where other people wouldn't.
He'd start out just talking,
and it would be nothing, like, for an hour.
You'd go, "Oh, you know, what's all this about?"
Then he'd come up with, like,
maybe a minute or two that night.
Then by the end of the week,
he'd have, like, five minutes.
Then at the end of next week, he'd have, like, 15 minutes.
Then the end of the third week,
he'd have, like, 45 minutes.
So in three weeks,
he'd develop, like, a 45-minute act, solid.
Killer.
But starting from ground zero.
One reason
Live in Concert is an incredible achievement
is that Richard was putting himself
as a character at the center of his work.
He's giving a portrait of who he is,
how he's been shaped,
and for that reason, you could argue it's, like,
one of the great autobiographies in American culture,
is Richard Pryor: Live in Concert.
Can you turn the lights up just for a moment?
Thank you.
I'd like to introduce you to someone.
Ladies and gentleman, Huey P. Newton.
Stand up, Huey.
The thing that's most powerful
about keeping the truth in your comedy
is people resonate with the truth.
People can identify it immediately.
You can feel that in your soul.
And being a comedian, what you're doing
is you're trying to tickle people's spirits.
I'd like to die like my father died.
Right, my father died fucking.
He did.
My father was 57 when he died, right?
And the woman was 18.
My father came and went at the same time.
So how does a middle-class, white Jewish kid
relate to the life of somebody
who grew up raised by his grandmother
in a cathouse,
who's been drug-addled,
been through so many relationships?
How do I relate and laugh at this?
And that's the brilliance of Richard.
The brilliance of Richard
is he made us all realize that we're humans.
My grandmother could do that shit real good.
"Help me, Jesus Lord! Help me, help me!
Take me! Take me!"
That's how she made me stop snorting cocaine.
I had the nerve to pull out some cocaine
at the dining room table.
She had never seen me do any, right?
And she looked at me a long time.
She's like, "Boy?
What's that you're putting up your nose?"
I said, "Cocaine, Mama."
"Jesus God!
Take me now, Lord! Take me now!
God, save my life! Take me, take me, take me!
Lord, help me, Jesus Christ..."
You get into that crossover world.
These people are paying to laugh at your pain,
and it made him angry...
because that shit was really hurting him,
and everyone's like, "Oh, we love you.
You're great."
And he's like, "What?
You know how painful that shit was
I had to go through
to make you laugh?
And you want to give me some fucking money for it?"
See, they're filming some shit.
I wanted to tell y'all.
I mean, like you didn't know.
Y'all ain't gonna get paid shit, either.
So don't be asking me for a motherfucking thing
when the show's over.
You could tell Richard Pryor loved his craft.
That's what made him strong.
Talent saved his life.
You know?
If he had not have found that,
he would have been still back in Peoria
standing with the winos.
Them the motherfuckers that didn't find they talent.
So imagine you standing there with them,
you find your talent,
you go off, become famous, rich,
everybody loves you,
don't know your past,
can't feel what you feel,
and you know, everybody's, "Oh, we love you!"
And you turn around,
and them winos is back here saying, "Richard!
Remember us, nigger?
Oh, you think you're better than us?"
"I don't think I'm better."
"Yes, you do."
"Okay.
I'm gonna go beat myself up.
Would that make you feel better?"
Because that's usually
what makes motherfuckers feel better.
People have a tendency of...
of being a better friend to you
when you fucked up.
The concert film comes out.
I mean, he really now crosses over.
Bam! He's huge.
All kinds of things are going on.
Offers are coming in.
People are coming to the house all the time to meet with him,
Scripts, directors, writers, offers.
Da-da-da... Everything's happening.
Everything's happening, everything's happening.
When the grandmother dies,
bam!
Everything kicks into another gear.
If you heard him talk about his grandmother,
I mean, it was in a God-like manner.
I mean, he loved, loved, loved his grandmother.
When his grandmother died, he was out of it.
This is the person who he loved most deeply,
the person who shaped him most.
She was his rock, his anchor, and then she's gone.
And he says, you know, when she dies,
"Everything I've got is gone."
One day, he's at the house,
and I knew something was wrong immediately.
Like, what the fuck is going on?
I smelled something.
I smelled fire.
I go back into the bedroom,
and he's standing there,
and the mattress is on fire.
He was freebasing already.
That had started,
and fire was there.
I mean, this was a precursor to what was going to happen.
When he discovered that pipe,
which he used to call "the devil's glass dick,"
all hell broke loose then.
I moved out
because, uh...
the drug had moved in.
Freebasing!
I freebased about eight months straight.
My bitch left me, I went crazy.
But I fell in love with this pipe.
This pipe controlled my very being.
This motherfucker say, "Don't answer the phone."
"We have smoking to do."
They're paying me $2 million to do this movie.
Do you believe it?
My grandmother didn't make that all her life,
and she was a better woman than you are a man.
Do you want to talk about this movie?
Yeah, sure.
What do you want to know about this movie?
"Stir Crazy..."
It sucks!
Gene Wilder said that...
Gene Wilder ain't shit. He's a faggot.
No, come on. You don't mean that.
Gene Wilder attracts pussy.
Gene Wilder attracts pussy, and some pretty white boys.
Richard Pryor around this time emerges as a movie star.
He is in many ways the first Black movie star
since Sidney Poitier,
which is kind of ironic,
because Poitier is the director of Stir Crazy.
Richard could be incredibly reliable
as an actor on a set,
but by the time we get to a film like Stir Crazy,
you know, he's deep in this hole
of his drug addiction.
Richard Pryor is a criminal.
I come from criminal people.
I will be a criminal.
I didn't get caught yesterday buying seven pounds of cocaine
in front of eight policemen.
The feds were on the set
because he was purchasing from Hell's Angels,
and he had no clarity.
I mean, it... he was gone on the drug.
I don't think people realize how many drugs,
how many cigarettes,
how many drinks he had.
He'd say, "See this bowl of coke?
This is more than you'll make in the next two years."
He said that all the time.
I ain't no good.
I ain't trying to be no good.
I don't care what y'all think,
because y'all always told me my mother was illegal,
my father was illegal.
Fuck you.
It was also a period of time
where it felt as if there were a void
that Martin Luther King's death had created,
Malcolm X's death,
all these leaders who had died.
It was almost as if people wanted to elevate him
to a stature that he didn't want the job.
He didn't want to speak for all Black people.
He was speaking for himself.
Let me be intelligent like Malcolm X.
The Black man,
the reason the revolution has come down is because...
I don't know nothing.
He moves into this space
where Muhammad Ali had been before him,
or Malcolm X.
He kind of took on this role
unintentionally, you know,
of being a kind of spokesperson,
you know, for the Black community,
and it was... you know, it was dicey.
I threw seven 17 times,
and my number's up,
but I kept the money.
There was a combustion happening,
and I could see it happening.
All of it had conspired to create a psyche in Richard
that was... it was too much.
He couldn't take it.
All I want to do is leave Tucson alive.
Hey.
It had accelerated to a point
where I really felt the grandmother, Mama,
was pulling him into the grave with her.
Okay...
It's okay, see?
Yeah. Yeah, we're okay.
Works okay?
Yeah.
I'm tip top.
Harry...
Harry, for God's sake!
You're going to get us in trouble!
Harry, it's all right.
I can't take it.
I can't take it!
Wait a minute! Wait a minute, Harry...
Mama!
Come here. Here, Harry!
Mama!
Take your pill, take your pill. There we are.
Three seconds, you'll see, and it's over.
One thousand one, one thousand two,
one thousand three. Finished!
Richard had walked off the set
and said, "Fuck you. I'm not finishing this."
Hannah Weinstein called me
and said, "Can you do something?"
I went out to the house,
and I said, "Richard, we're going to be fine.
This is all going to pass.
You're going to get off these drugs.
We're going to have a good life.
We're going to have babies.
We're going to have a wonderful life.
We're going to be okay."
I wanted to prove to Richard
that I was going to love him no matter what,
and this love would fix everybody.
It would fix me, it would fix him...
but it was a mound of cocaine like that
on this antique child's desk.
Aunt Dee was there at the time,
and another bodyguard,
and these hangers-on from Peoria.
I said, "He's going to do something.
He's going to hurt himself."
"Get out of here."
They just... you know, they dismissed me.
They didn't believe me.
I drove back to Beverly Hills.
I called the house, and I said,
"I want to talk to Richard,"
and the next thing I know, the phone drops,
and I hear screaming.
Richard had run through the kitchen on fire.
He had lit himself on fire.
June 9th, 1980.
He ran out of the house,
into the street, running down the street...
...Also, EMTs will be arriving shortly...
Paramedics found writer and comedian
Richard Pryor wandering dazed
and badly burned over the upper half of his body
near his Los Angeles-area home last night.
When he first arrived at the Sherman Oaks Hospital,
officials gave him only one chance in three to survive.
He was either going to live or die.
No one knew at that moment,
but what he didn't need, alive or dead,
was a massive drug bust
and other federal charges on top of this.
The motion picture studio...
In those days,
before studios were overtaken
by giant international corporations,
they were still run like independent nations
floating on the sea of Los Angeles,
and each studio had a security system.
We always knew about what was happening
with our key stars
before the newspapers,
and frequently before the cops.
I got Larry to organize our security department,
and they rolled out to the house and shut it off.
They took $880,000 in cash out of the house
that was laying around on tables.
They took out a couple of garbage bags' worth of drugs,
a massive amount of coke,
some freebase paraphernalia,
and a dozen guns.
Once we had cleaned the premises,
we let the police in.
Police and firemen finally scaling a fence
to check the house for evidence
of a butane cigarette lighter which might have exploded.
They didn't find it.
His body functions have stabilized.
By the very fact that he has done well his first night,
the doctors and the staff at Sherman Oaks Burn Center
are encouraged.
While he was in the hospital,
he wouldn't see me.
I stopped going.
The night before he got out, he called me
and said, "Come see me."
He was a different man.
I walked in, he was different.
He was just so changed.
It was as if the fire had...
taken something out of him.
I didn't recognize him.
Physically changed.
Spiritually.
I was... I was devastated.
The changes are so immense for me.
It's like June 9th will be my birthday, you know.
Because sometimes I feel like there's a person, Richard Pryor,
and he does all this comedy and stuff,
and then there's me,
and I wonder what I have to do with Richard.
You know, I live in his house and I drive his car,
and I spend his money...
you know, but it ain't me.
It's not me.
I started seeing someone else.
I'm trying to move on with my life,
and we didn't see each other until January 1981,
and he asked me to come to Hawaii.
I met him at the airport, actually,
and he proposed.
He got high on grass,
and got very paranoid,
and I helped calm him down,
and he said, "You've been so good to me.
I'm really...
I want you to marry me."
And I'm like, "Oh, my God,"
and a week later, we were married.
The first time I went to Hana,
I understood who Richard was,
because it's a quiet place.
It's an elegant place.
It's one of the most beautiful places I've ever seen.
I believe Richard found his true peace there,
and it was such a dichotomy
to see this predatory creature stalking the stage,
doing this hard-driving comedy,
and then you'd see him in Hana
become who Richard really was, I believe,
which was this quiet, elegant, serene soul.
And I just think all his pain washed away there, you know?
And all his self-doubt,
self-recrimination about his family
and where he came from.
I think it was just something that he could grab hold of
that would allow him
just for a little while
leave all that sadness behind, you know?
The fire was a suicide attempt.
He needed to still ground himself.
But of course, those loud voices of commerciality
prevailed... when they shouldn't have.
Everyone's telling him,
"This is when you've got to do another concert film."
We ended up going back to Los Angeles.
It was too soon.
The craziness started,
the late nights,
and cocaine all night, and...
And shooting Live on Sunset
turned out to be... a problem.
Relax.
Calm down.
Because I feel the tension from y'all.
Y'all want me to do so well.
I want to do so well for you.
But let's relax and enjoy...
...whatever the fuck happens.
While it was going on,
it was a damn nightmare.
He walked off stage the first night.
The second night, he did well,
but they had to do re-shoots,
which nobody really knows.
They go, "Oh, it was so great. He was...
He did a great comeback."
Meh, it was not the great comeback
that everybody thought it was.
I remember the first time I did freebase,
I burnt my bed up.
The bed's on fire?
The Sunset Strip, in my mind,
is really the last
strong piece of material he did.
It's like, what's that?
Richard Pryor running down the street.
Live on the Sunset Strip,
you sort of see him in this mode
where he's transitioning
from the edgy Richard Pryor to the more user-friendly.
I've been wrong.
I've got to re-group my shit.
I mean, I said,
I ain't gonna never call another Black man a nigger.
He makes this pronouncement
that he's not going to use the word "nigger" again.
When he said it, people were like, "Whoa."
Richard Pryor
without the word "nigger"
is kind of like Muhammad Ali without boxing gloves.
What Richard did with that small bit of language
I think still resonates with us to this day,
when people talk about "the N word."
I don't think Richard Pryor was ever as funny again.
After that,
he will appear in all these mediocre movies,
bullshit like The Toy,
or Brewster's Millions or what have you.
The Sunset Strip is really the beginning of his transition
into work that's not nearly as challenging
or as compelling.
I mean, the thing is
Richard Pryor in the '80s is able to make a lot of money.
Remember, he began on the fringes of American life,
in this no-name brothel,
and first he starts in these fringe productions,
but then he's going to become a big Hollywood star.
The guy who grew up in a brothel
suddenly is one of the major names
in '80s Hollywood.
We took a honeymoon after we shot Live on Sunset,
and we chartered a boat in the Caribbean.
Well, trouble started right away.
You know, marriage doesn't fix anything...
and he hit me...
for the last time.
I said, "You're not going to hit me anymore.
We're done."
I got off the boat shortly thereafter,
flew back to L.A., hired a divorce attorney.
It was so crazy.
Oh, my God.
It was crazy.
It never stopped.
After I did the Pryor show,
a few years went by.
I'm literally on the toilet, and my phone rings.
"Rocco. It's Rich."
I went, "What's up, man?"
He said, "I want you to write a movie with me,
about my life.
Where are you?"
I said, "I'm on the toilet."
"So after you're done taking a shit,
come over to Columbia."
I said, "What do you want to do, man?
You really want to do this?"
"I wanted you to know what I experienced
as a kid in Peoria,
and how my grandmother was so influential to me."
And I went, "Wow.
Whew!
I don't know... I don't know, Rich.
I mean, I don't know if I'm capable of doing this."
We decide to go back to Peoria and shoot in the brothel,
in the house that he was raised in.
He walked right into the dragon's den,
and said, "Here I am."
"I ain't afraid."
I'll knock the cowboy...
Jo Jo Dancer,
he's not only showing you
that his mother was a sex worker,
he's letting you experience the fact
that he was taunted for that, you know,
and, like, got beat up,
so there was a lot of pain, and just childhood trauma.
When we shot the scene
where little Jo Jo sees his mom,
I remember hiding in the back watching him,
directing the scene,
and I remember the look on his face.
It was kind of surreal that he was doing this.
You know, when I was younger and I watched Jo Jo Dancer,
I did not understand it,
then I watched it again when I got older,
and I was like, "Oh, yeah,"
because the underbelly is, like, so dark, you know,
and how dramatic he was
but funny at the same time
was so beautiful.
He could joke about it in his act,
but it took him maybe 20 years into a career
before he actually felt like,
"Okay, this is what it was," you know.
"Deal with it."
He just needed to have
that kind of moment of truth
with himself and with his audience.
I was seeing him on and off for that whole decade.
Richard didn't ever let go of any women.
He would recycle us all.
But in 1989,
I worked with him on See No Evil, Hear No Evil,
and I remember one day, I said to him,
"Why are you walking like an old man?"
And he said, "I have something to tell you."
And he told me he was diagnosed with M.S.
He was drinking water glasses full of vodka,
and taking pills,
and all sorts of hangers-on were around,
and I said, "Richard..."
He said, "I need help.
I need you to help me."
I decided to come back into his life.
I couldn't say no.
I had a tremendous...
not only still loved him,
but had a profound sense of loyalty.
Jennifer had come back into his life.
She was doing a spectacular job of keeping him alive.
It was not easy.
That he had lived that long was a small miracle,
given the drug abuse,
and the people he was hanging out with,
and the silliness.
This guy meant so much to me,
and that's when he was already sick,
and he did a tour from a wheelchair,
when his instrument was voice,
and he couldn't talk,
but always being true to himself
and true to the artist that he was,
then he started talking about that.
The last time I saw Richard,
he could hardly speak,
and he had a smile,
and a wistful kind of painful wisdom
behind his eyes,
but we just kind of...
grabbed hands,
and, um, looked at each other,
you know?
The last time I saw Pryor,
we sat and watched two blessed hours
of clips of his,
and it was so wonderful,
and, uh...
and then, and it's double-edged,
because here he's sitting in front of me
unable to move, and...
The way of life is too much.
I still have his ashes.
He was cremated,
and his wish was to spread them in Hana,
and I haven't done that yet...
Where he was most at peace,
where he was happiest,
where he loved being, you know,
that's where he should rest.
Yeah.
So we have to do that.
Richard Pryor has had a huge effect
on today's comedy.
He basically kicked the freedom of speech door
wide open,
and I think that's what Richard Pryor
was trying to say the whole time.
Like, what your experience in life is
is what makes you.
What your soul is is what makes you,
not your skin,
and just because my skin is like this
don't mean you should shoot me.
Whores, pimps,
drugs, poverty, racism.
He took all that dark shit and made it light.
Pryor was a nice, safe comedian,
and then one day he got up and goes, "You know what?
This is bullshit.
I have some stuff to say."
It was a new consciousness
with a lot of white kids
that they got from him
of how horribly difficult life had been
for millions of Black people,
because he brought that into his comedy
in a way that was palatable to them
and truthful to Black audiences,
so I think that's an astonishing accomplishment.
I would say 90% of Black comics
are trying to be Richard,
but they are no Richard Pryor.
There will only be one Richard Pryor.
That's it.
Accept Richard for what he is,
listen to the albums, watch the videos,
enjoy it like you would a fine wine,
but do your own style.
It was...
the brilliance was making his world
relatable to everyone.
There will never be anybody close.
There will never be anybody like.
There will never be anybody as important as Richard Pryor.
We're looking at an oblivious...
genius.
Oblivious.
Don't know what the fuck is going, just...
that's how you know he was a gift to us from God,
because he made it through that flame.
You make it through that flame
so that you are able to talk to us
and tell us about it?
A jewel.
I think Richard would want to be remembered
for making people laugh, sure,
but on a bigger scale,
for telling the truth,
and how important that is.
I think that is the bigger message for Richard,
and that Richard would want to be remembered for.
We are...
gathered here today...
on this sorrowful occasion
to say goodbye
to the dearly departed.
In other words, the nigger dead.
Can I get an amen?
Amen!
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